Coming into Campus Crusade, I noticed our organizational culture reserved transparency for those closest to the top. At large, our regional and national team held many ideas, beliefs, and strategies close to the chest.
I have seen our local movement expand transparency beyond the staff team to the students. At first it was our student leaders, but we have seen the effectiveness of transparency with our mission, vision, and values to those new to our movement.
As more and more students come in suspicious of authority and critical of almost everything, I can see transparency not only growing in breadth, but also in depth in the sense of becoming integrated with every aspect of ministry.
With our student leaders, we are seeing that it's not only important to have transparent conversations periodically, but also live out transparency at each and every meeting we have with them. At this point we are not supplying enough transparency to meet the demand.
Organizationally I believe we could grow leaps and bounds here. The 'need to know basis' philosophy in my opinion should be thrown out of the window. There are certainly things that those below do not need to know, but I'm challenging the fundamental assumption that it's wrong or bad for those below the leader to be kept out of the PROCESS. I've noticed that even though some of our students disagree with our decisions, they highly value being brought into the process and at least having their say on the front-end.
As a not-so-new-but-not-old staff member, one of my greatest needs is to believe I'm included in our regional decision making process. I would not want to stay and grow into an old staff member AND be excluded or obtusely included.
Image courtesy of funkybug's photostream
